Guardina mindsets

A long complaining piece in the Guardian today from a German couple deciding to leave the UK because of Brexit:

Auf wiedersehen, Britain: Brexit is forcing my German family to leave the country we call home

As usual, I was hoping to find in it some basis for the passionate appeal the EU seems to engender in people

The husband and father apparently speaks on behalf of his family. How has he been 'forced' to leave? This seem to be Snowflake for not liking what Brexit might imply.  It might be that no security to remain is actually offered despite promises, or  that the parents might have to register to stay in the UK, which is somehow offensive because it was a 'free' right before. He feels he has turned from being a European citizen to being a supplicant. He 'had no say' in the decision, nor was he allowed to vote in the Referendum, although Commonwealth citizens were.

He is an arts journalist, so there is also the fall in the pound which apparently prevented the chance to buy a painting for the nation,and the need to transfer the European Youth Orchestra from the UK to Italy

UK politicians seem to be 'distressingly myopic and feckless' and inept. 'Journalists seem biased and underinformed in equal measure.' Brexit has dominated the agenda for his work. He seems to have worried himself by reading jokey remarks about the smaller Toblerone chocolate bar being a 'Brexit Toblerone' (attributed to J Prescott). The UK will lose the talents of himself, his wife (a surgeon) and his two (apparently very bright) children, so there.

The article then goes on to describe life in Germany in pretty bleak terms. There are German equivalents of B Johnson. The kids' new school is not multicultural. The kids feel the UK is their home and support the English football team. There is 'impoliteness, control freakery and permanent moaning that I associate with much of German public life.'

On balance, the UK seems better if anything. What's the problem?

Our response to Brexit is as much emotional as a practical. Isn’t that correct, though, considering that the leave vote was entirely rooted in emotion? It is not easy to stay calm and rational when faced with the visceral, self-aggrandising, jingoistic drivel that flows endlessly from some in the leave camp. It is painful to see how Britain, particularly England, has bought into its own imperial, nostalgic myth and is now falling prey to the resulting delusions.

I must say I still don't get it. We might get a glimpse of what might be called a working ideology at the level of ordinary thought, based on incorrigible affect. If it is all based on emotional reactions, anything counts as evidence -- the 'validity of tears' again. Emotional reactions are the only possible response to political and economic questions. We should re-run the Referndum, this time just asking people how they feel?